Cathy Mosca posted a New York Times article on TomPeters.com entitled “The Self-Employed Depression.”
Now, maybe I’m just too new to the ranks of the “self-employed” to be so jaded, but the Wall Street Journal today posted an article entitled “Processing a Software Idea Into a Suite Job at Google” — a story about how Sam Schillace, an engineering director at Google, got that way.
Serial entrepreneur Sam Schillace had been writing software professionally for 16 years when one of his ideas caught Google’s attention. Within seven months, he had sold his online word-processing program to the search-engine giant, where it joined an existing online spreadsheets program to form Google Docs. Now, he oversees engineering for Google products including Gmail, Picasa and Reader.
That’s a much more hopeful article — very positive about the need for perseverance.
Schillace says, “You start a company because you have an idea that you think will be great for some customer — and great ideas are always worth doing, even in a tough market. It’s also the case that many big companies are started during downturns and benefit from the added focus and discipline that’s necessary. So it might actually be the best time to start a company, if it’s the right idea and it’s done well.”
Admittedly, Google represents a world that most of us don’t have the skills to aspire to. But there’s also a whole lot of ground between Google and “depression.” That’s ground that most of us can take, to one degree or another.
Here’s what I recommended the last time I was in this position:
… when I started, I almost had to be frantic about getting paying work. I can’t say it enough: pursue new work furiously. By that, I mean you should do all you can to make sure you are doing an effective job of selling yourself, and not worry about much of anything else. Even if you’re not comfortable selling yourself, it’s the one thing you should be doing with all of your might. In my case, I did everything that the job search professionals recommend in order to get new work – networking, cold-calling, mass-mailings – and I put a great deal of effort into all three of those methods. I ended up getting work from all of those sources, as well as from other sources.
From Breaking Free, The Quest, pg 96.